jwz

Mom: What's with these AIs escaping and hacking people? Me: You park your car at the top of a hill. You leave a note on the dashboard that says "please be good" and then you pull the parking brake. The car careens down the hill, smashes everything up, and you put out a press release saying "My car ignored my instructions! It hallucinated! It went rogue!" Your insurance company not only believes you, but invests $100 million in your company. Mom: Jesus Fucking Christ https://jwz.org/b/ylA5

It's not illegal if you buy new laws. Lyft has to pay out $272 million for the fraud they perpetrated on their employees from 2016 through 2020! But then in 2020, they spent $200 million to make that fraud legal, so now they won't have to pay that again in the future! According to methane-breathing money-ghouls who run our world, this was a great investment: they could have just spent an additional $50M/year on salaries, but now they legalized an across-the-board ... https://jwz.org/b/ylAu

@init6@mastodon.social My favorite part of Disclosure Day was when the old lady in curlers comes out and yells "whatever you're doing it's illegal!" Oh wait no that was in Close Encounters which also sucked.

@davidgerard@circumstances.run I'm pretty sure that "benefits Melania" is not on his list, but it might benefit him somehow!

@jef@mastodon.social Yup that's why I hate VLC alright

DNA Lounge Update, Wherein it is Spooky Season https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/10/07.html?utm_source=sp_ma

Somehow the "Afterglow" .saver manages to have thumbnails too, but I can't tell what they're doing differently...

@glyph@mastodon.social Yeah she has been giving strong "amoral grifter" vibes for a while now.

Ballot arrived today! So USPS has not yet been completely compromised... But I will still probably return it using a drop box rather than the mail.

@tartley@fosstodon.org Never. Studied.

DNA Lounge Update, Wherein we return this blog to our core competency: plumbing disasters https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/10/05.html?utm_source=sp_ma

@bignose@sw-development-is.social I use CloudFront only for images and CSS (URLs on my cdn.* subdomains) so that is presumably 100% AI scraper bots loading images over and over and over again.

@chronodm@glammr.us I hope you had a machete handy

@mikehoss@appdot.net That video is a load of shit, applying agency, personality and goals to linear algebra. No, just no.

@robpike@cosocial.ca @timbray@cosocial.ca I recently picked up a Canon G7X and I love it -- physical optics and yet small enough to fit in my pocket ("camera you have"). Plus it has *exactly the same UI* that I still have muscle memory for from my old SLRs that I haven't touched in a decade.

I Tear Secrets From Your Yielding Flesh. Nicola Turner: A site-responsive installation made mainly from dark wool and horsehair will fill the ground-floor galleries at 16 Hanover Square, extending in a procession-like manner that continues 12 metres... https://jwz.org/b/ylAK

Every year or so I forget and investigate: "Surely there's a way to set my business's Facebook account to disallow comments by default?" and every year I realize that the answer is is no because drive-by rage from haters is their entire business model.

@redezem@aus.social Thanks for this! I had been trying to reproduce some of the weird reports on macOS 27.0.1 with no luck. And... I can't reproduce this either. Do you have some trick to make it fail this way? (E.g. does the failure require multiple screens attached?)

DNA Lounge Update, Wherein the slopbros won't stop https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/10/06.html?utm_source=sp_ma

Someone 'Torturing' LLMs in a Robot Prison Has Triggered the Dumbest Debate in AI Yet. Jason Koebler: One of the most heated discussions occurring on X at the moment is about the ethics of a GitHub project in which a person is running Saw-like... https://jwz.org/b/ylAM

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 260. https://jwz.org/b/ylAw

The continuing downfall of USPS. For the third or fourth year in a row, it is October and USPS has issued new Christmas stamps but there are *no* Halloween stamps on sale. I'm sure this is also DeJoy's fault. https://jwz.org/b/ylAO

Hammer Time. A friend told me they were planning an October rewatch of classic horror movies. I said, "So just Hammer, huh?" They said, "...what?" Ok, so, some of you never studied, and don't know about Hammer Horror. I have made you an introductory playlist. https://jwz.org/b/ylBB

Today in the scraperpocalypse... Let me just take a nice long sip of this beverage and then open up my web-hosting bill for last month... https://jwz.org/b/ylAU

DNA Lounge Update, Wherein there's a little more about the parklet https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/09/26.html?utm_source=sp_ma

@dannyman@sfba.social @theorangetheme@en.osm.town Tell me you've never spoken to someone who played The Sims without telling me you've never spoken to someone who played The Sims. Apparently Stephen King is the world's most prolific serial killer, since "writing down mean words" is the same as torture now. "Misery" alone sold over a million copies. That's a million dudes who don't exist, tied to chairs that don't exist. Won't someone think of the nonexistent dudes? Has someone asked the chair how it felt?

@grumpybozo@toad.social ...and I haven't heard anything yet about which quisling they found to replace him.

JFC, Xcode 27 is pushing the AI bullshit *harrrrrd*. There are 3 or 4 preference checkboxes for "No AI plz" but they barely do anything. Every single compilation warning has a little sparkle-icon where you can ask the plagiarism machine to drop a turd onto the deprecated method you were calling. You can't make it go away, at all. "In Xcode 27, agents are becoming the primary way to interact with the coding assistant" -- eat my fuck you goddamned traitors.

Recent movies and TV. Disclosure Day (2026): This was a hate-watch for sure. What in the Whitley Strieber Dr. Doolittle bullshit did I just sit through. Spielberg is such a hack. How did this guy manage to make Raiders when every other thing he has... https://jwz.org/b/ylBH

Seasons Greetings from Tall Slut No Panties! Krysten Ritter on the hellsite: https://jwz.org/b/ylAq

It's hard to explain Gavin Newsom to someone who hasn't seen The Dead Zone.

@mattblaze@federate.social "I didn't mean to cheat on you, it's just that my genitals went rogue"

@glyph@mastodon.social They are all properly developer signed as far as I am aware, but Apple's signing infrastructure is shifting sands, so who knows? If you understand this stuff and could look at one of the .saver bundles and say "yes that looks signed correctly", that would be helpful. But, the savers *run* and I would expect that to not happen if they were improperly signed.

@mathowie@xoxo.zone "Midsommar (2019)"

@mtconleyuk@mastodonapp.uk Dad Rock is Korn now

@zzt@mas.to Terminology problem. The RMS definition of "simplicity" is "the only data structures allowed are conses of symbols".

@jef@mastodon.social That scooter must have been going pretty fast to flip over that picnic table.

Another codesign firedrill. Apple let stuff expire, so now we have to re-roll our certs, hooray. I have questions: When they say: Installer packages [...] will no longer install. Re-sign all packages with your new certificate before this date. Mac... https://jwz.org/b/ylA1

@datarama@hachyderm.io 3: "Why not both?"

DNA Lounge Update, Wherein Folsom Street Events has fucked us, and not in the consensual way https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2026/09/27.html?utm_source=sp_ma

"AI" once again revealed to be three perverts in a trenchcoat. Humans Are Reading Copilot Prompts -- And They're Horrified: Human contractors hired to improve Microsoft's Copilot AI chatbot are constantly bombarded with lewd or sexually explicit photo... https://jwz.org/b/ylAE

@skjeggtroll@mastodon.online @cstross@wandering.shop Everyone who says "cookies were a mistake" has failed to think through what would have happened instead: unreadable URLs tracking state via kilobyte-long hex blob query parameters. At least that didn't happen [ taps headset ] I am now being informed...

Dear Lazyweb, if you have some very old Macs, I would like you to test some things. I have a handful of very old XScreenSaver DMGs on the downloads page because, for example, 5.14 was the last XScreenSaver binary release capable of running on PPC. Due to recent Apple stupidity, I was forced to re-codesign these old DMGs. So I'd like to know if they still install and run on very old Macs -- which I do not have. I'd like a status report on: https://jwz.org/b/ylBF

@HalfCap@mastodon.social Nope. After nuking those files, System Settings repopulates them with the generic "swirly" images. I also tried wiping ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.iconservices.store and /Library/Caches/com.apple.iconservices.store and killing iconservicesd.

@thetruejona@mastodon.social This is by design. Blame the AI scrapers.